In the second part of her look at the Bradford local election campaign, Anne Czernik takes soundings in Little Horton, where the city's Labour leader Ian Greenwood is defending his seat.

Alyas Karmani, Respect's candidate running in Little Horton, is director of Street, a national project working with at-risk young people. He has campaigned for social justice since he wrote his first paper on the subject at the age of 14 but never stood for office. What changed?

He says:

Last year, I had 15 people working for me, mentoring over 100 kids. They cut our funding to zero and one of our kids went and shot someone. Just before the riots. That is the impact of the public sector cuts. Youth services have been decimated, youth unemployment is at its highest level. In Bradford , 60% of our kids are coming out of schools without five GCSE passes – what are their life opportunities going to be?

Karmani saw the momentum created by Galloway's win and put himself forward when the new MP asked local people to sign up as candidates during a rally in a local park. Hundreds applied, like Karmani, who thought:

We've got to create a radical political shift back towards real people and real issues, if we can do that now we can build on it, create a ripple efffect and in two years time in a general election and subsequent council elections there is a real chance for change.

A professional man in his twenties handing out leaflets for Respect says:

Bussed-in English Defence League supporters vent their frustration on police last year as Bradford stays calm. Photograph: John Giles/PA

My parents came in the sixties and I wonder what kind of stuff they went through. We moved into a primarily white area in 1996 and it was 'Paki this' and 'Paki that' and we ignored it. Eggs were thrown at the windows. As a child growing up with that - it was scary. I thought it was my fault because I had a brown skin or because I was a Muslim. How do you teach a six year old why this is happening?'

Times have changed and everyone I meet on the Canterbury estate says things are better now. When the English Defence League demonstrated in Bradford last year, the city stood firm, holding peace vigils and threading flowers through the streets to show that Bradford is a united and peaceful place. Karmani says:

Politicians create a message that Bradford is a divided city. But Canterbury isn't a divided estate. This is a great city with enormous potential.

Zulfi Karim, general secretary of Bradford Council for Mosques, takes a similar line in criticising the Channel 4 programme Make Bradford British, with its emphasis on division. The question is not what divides the city, he says, but what unites its diverse communities.Ron, a white Bradfordian in his 70s who has lived on Canterbury all his life is another who takes the same line, as he jokes with a Respect campaigner, a neighbour called Khan whom he's known, and liked, for more years than either cares to remember. Both raised their families against a backdrop of racial tension, and they want no more of it.In this context, Karmani isn't chasing the mythical 'Muslim vote'. Little Horton is a diverse ward, he says, in which:

The people who are most in need are poor white families. They are the ones who are most avoided and most ignored. If elected, I will be bringing attention to them, otherwise we don't believe in social justice, we would just be believing in saving ourselves.

Austerity may be achieve what years of attempts at a cohesive policy failed to do. In Little Horton, working class people are being drawn together by the impact of hard times. More binds than divides the various communities there. They are rejecting mainstream politics because of a feeling that they have been cast adrift without representation, without a voice.

The city that gave birth to Old Labour, with the foundation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, could be seeing its ghost rise up to haunt its modern reincarnation, New Labour. A taxi driver on the Canterbury estate tells me:

People that I pick up ask me what team I support, and I say: 'You're not interested in the team I support'. They say 'What's that, then?' and I say 'My wife and three kids. I can't afford anything else. I was never a chaudhary and I never will be a chaudhary (slang for a wealthy landlord). I'm just a working class person. Baraderi (the traditional Pakistani system of clan voting on elders' advice) should break. It has to go. It's the old Pakistani mentality – that's what happens over there.